The isle of Atlantis, your home, is sinking. Will you be able to save your people in time?
Atlantis Rising is a co-operative worker placement game in which you must work together with up to six other players to deploy citizens across your homeland, gathering resources in order to build a cosmic gate that can save your people. Workers placed close to the shoreline are more rewarding, but are more likely to be flooded and the actions lost.
Every turn, each player draws a misfortune card that will flood certain locations along the ever-shrinking Atlantis shoreline, or may otherwise work to undermine your efforts to save your people. So you must race to gather the necessary resources to build and power the gate, before the island disappears beneath the waves forever.
This edition contains all new art and graphic design, created to bring even more attention to the thematic setting of the game. The Athenians Attack phase has been replaced with the Wrath of the Gods phase, requiring more strategic planning and adding to the sense of urgency. Now, instead of placing workers in an Atlantean Navy, players must cooperatively decide to flood a set number of tiles at the end of each round. To further aid them in their task, Councilor player powers have been expanded and made more impactful, and the knowledge deck has similarly been revised and expanded. The variable gate components, once built, no longer offer one-time bonuses, but create new worker placement spots where players can send Atlantean workers to unleash actions to help save their island.
- beautiful components and immersive art
- high replayability due to many blueprints and artifacts
- strong asymmetry and characterful powers
- easy to teach for a coop game
- supports 1-7 players with scalable difficulty and pacing
- setup can involve some tedious map assembly
- cooperative play can lead to quarterbacking in some groups
- peninsulas look similar which can slow setup unless you pay attention to icons
- cooperative survival in a mythic Atlantean setting
- Isle of Atlantis under threat from rising oceans; a group of Atlanteans seeks to escape via a dimensional portal
- team-based rescue mission with asymmetric leader abilities
- Spirit Island
- Pandemic Legacy
- Twilight Imperium
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- asymmetric leadership abilities — each leader confers unique abilities that affect turns and strategy
- Blueprint Construction — nine blueprints build toward a dimensional portal; resources can be shared at common spaces
- cooperative resource management — resources must be pooled and allocated to build blueprints and power core
- Deck building — two decks (library and artifact) provide powerful abilities and options
- deck building / library and artifact cards — two decks (library and artifact) provide powerful abilities and options
- flooding / track-based timing — board flood progresses via the wrath of the gods and misfortune events
- misfortune deck and wrath of the gods — random events and a tracking mechanism push flooding and pressure
- Positive player interaction — final multi-resource objective; all players must contribute to win
- power core / dimensional portal — final multi-resource objective; all players must contribute to win
- Resource management — resources must be pooled and allocated to build blueprints and power core
- Scaling with player count — more players alter misfortune deck size and pacing; time tightens as threat rises
- variable replayability — randomized blueprints/artifacts provide wide variety each game
- worker placement — players send workers to various action spaces to collect resources or trigger effects
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- one to seven players in the same game that's such a challenge
- Atlantis Rising has a lot of positive points
- it's easy to teach a new gamer or maybe someone who's not as a hardcore of a gamer
- this is a masterpiece in the board game world
- one to seven players is a masterpiece in the board game world